Blog Roll

News Posts

On Saturday, February 4, the Story Pirates, a media and arts group that celebrates the words and ideas of young authors through comedy, will bring kids’ stories about the Museum to life by acting them out on the stage. Story Pirate Sam Reiff-Pasarew recently answered a few questions about the upcoming production, Story Pirates: My Museum Story.

The discovery of a small jade tool that was dropped into the waters off an island in the Southwest Pacific about 3,300 years ago is stirring up questions about its origin. The reason for puzzlement: the small green artifact has a chemical composition that is unlike any other described jade, and it was found thousands of miles away from the nearest known geological source.

An international team of archaeologists and geologists from the American Museum of Natural History, the University of Otago (New Zealand), and the University of Papua New Guinea investigate this unusual specimen in a special issue of the European Journal of Mineralogy on jadeitite, the rock that defines one type of jade.

Highly publicized outbreaks of diseases such as Ebola and swine flu raise the specter of pandemic, but these are just the most famous examples of viruses that spread from animals to humans. At February’s SciCafe on Wednesday, February 1, computational biologist Dan Janies and virologist Nathan Wolfe will discuss their efforts to track infectious agents in animals before they reach people. Janies, who helped develop a technology called Supramap, recently answered a few questions about how supercomputers could stop the next global pandemic.

Imagine creating your very own Space Show and then seeing it presented on the dome of the Hayden Planetarium. That’s the thrill in store for a select group of 20 middle school students who participate in the Museum’s first-ever Digital Universe Flight School this February.

On Tuesday, January 31, visit the Hayden Planetarium to see stunning images from past NASA missions combined with visualizations from the Digital Universe Atlas, a scientifically accurate 3D map of the cosmos. Starting at 6:30 pm, Emily Rice, a research scientist in the Museum’s Department of Astrophysics, and Brian Levine, an astrophysics educator in theDepartment of Education, will fly you through the solar system to see where NASA spacecraft have gone, where they might go in the future, and what we might learn about our solar system from these missions as part of NASA Missions, this month’s Astronomy Live event. Rice and Levine recently answered a few questions about their experiences in the dome and their favorite NASA milestones.